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After more than a decade of security researchers raising the alarm over critical electronic voting machine vulnerability, I hope this finally causes some real d

• ThomPete 9y ago
  No one really claims that the voting machines were secure because it was technically advanced. The voting system is secure because it is irregular and physically distributed and not connected. In other words. Hacking the election is up there with the us planned 9/11 it would require social engineering of unheard proportions.
  • yflu 9y ago
    There are far far too many links in that massive chain to trust on obscurity as security.
    • ThomPete 9y ago
      Unless you can point to how someone get access to a lot of machines at one time then yes obscurity is actually a really strong method. Furthermore it's not just obscurity it's also the other things I mentioned non-connectedness being one of the biggest.
      • deif 9y ago
        You don't need to get access to a lot of machines. Because the chain is long and obscure, there's no way to be verifiable, and even if there was that chain would require specialist infallible programmers to ensure nothing has been tampered with. I'm not sure how you can argue that obscurity is a strong method of security when one machine in the country could be compromised, or the counting method code could be compromised, or the programmer verifying the code could be compromised, or the distribution system of voting machines could be compromised, or any part inside the voting machines could be compromised (e.g. the touch interface), or the voting machine remains secure during the voting period (i.e. voters are tampering with it on poll day).
        • ThomPete 9y ago
          If the machines aren't connected of course you need access to a lot of machines to have any effect on an election. All machines are hackable all systems are hackable. But focusing on the box showing you can hack that changes absolutely nothing about the overall threat of the US election being hacked. No one with serious technical understanding would claim that it was impossible to hack the boxes. And so you are back to a much harder task which is the social engineering part of convincing thousands of people to betray their country and no one finding out.
          • foepys 9y ago
            > All machines are hackable all systems are hackable. Then why use machines at all? As mentioned in this thread multiple times, Germany can count all votes within a few hours without any voting machines.
            • rurban 9y ago
              To alter the results in a cheaper way than with traditional vote stuffing methods, as recently observed in the Turkish national referendum. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.09839 https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.09839
            • ThomPete 9y ago
              Since when has any of this been rational? People want digital because they think it's better or more accurate.
  • learc83 9y ago
    In a close election it's potentially feasible to flip an election by hacking the machines in a few hundred precincts across 2 or 3 states. Still unlikey but potentially feasible given a determined, well funded adversary. And you wouldn't have to actually flip the election to undermine it's legitimacy. >In other words. Hacking the election is up there with the us planned 9/11 9/11 happened, so someone planned it. Very few people are worried about the US government hacking voting precincts. They're worried about a foreign government doing it.
    • ThomPete 9y ago
      Hacking the machines in a few hundred precincts is impossible and not more possible today than it was 10 or 20 years ago. 9/11 happened because someone outside the government planned it and it didn't need that many to work. If the US government was behind it the way the conspiracy theories are told, it would have had to involve tens of thousands of people. Hacking the election to be anything meaningful would require exactly the same thing.
      • CydeWeys 9y ago
        I don't understand what makes you think some massive conspiracy would be required. With a remote exploit you wouldn't need many conspirators at all. And plenty of elections are stolen each year the old-fashioned way with a massive number of conspirators, and ... it works.
        • ThomPete 9y ago
          Remote how? They aren't connected to the net.
          • CydeWeys 9y ago
            You sure about that? Most of them have WiFi cards in them; they're connected to something, that is likely reachable from the net. You can also imagine a single person compromising the firmware to be used in the next election to randomly flip enough votes over to a specific side to cause a win. This could be done by either an insider, or an outsider that has managed to hack the voting machine company's network.